Rogue: Going Rogue by author Robert Rodi, Illustrations Cliff Richards and Rodolfo Migliari
Rogue, Going Rouge is about Rogue, obviously. The book starts off simple enough, at least relatively speaking, this is a comic book after all. The title character is lured back home to deal with a problem in her small town, something involving a mutant with dream manipulation powers. It’s easy to forget that she is kind of a hick. But it’s also nice to see characters that aren’t just from New York or California.
So Rogue goes home to the midwest and has a bunch of feelings that are very specific to her power set. She’s sad that she can’t have a normal life involving physical touch and she’s feeling lonely. Her typical strife, which is understandable but gets repetitive. Meanwhile, her paramore Gambit is blind at this time and feels bad about an interaction he had with her before, so he sets off to find her blind without any help. This is ill advised.
Anytime Rogue and Gambit are together is magic. They are the best relationship Marvel Comics has to offer. Hell, the best relationship comic books in general has to offer. When they’re together in this book is when it’s at its best.
However, the rest of the book derails into a sea of cameos and overlapping plots. Rogue is suddenly in Japan and Lady Deathstrike, Sunstorm, and Silver Samurai are all present. X Men books like to jump over to Japan without any notice. This is strangely common, especially for Wolverine.
There was also an art change around this point that I really didn’t care for. Another flaw of comic books, the ever rotating staff. I would prefer some consistency, especially in these short runs.
Then the end involves something I really hate in comics or media in general. There’s a lot of reality and time manipulation which basically just resets everything that just happened back to where the book started but it calls itself an ending. If you just reset everything that means nothing happened and this book had no point at all! That’s not an ending! That’s boring! It’s as bad as the “it was all a dream trope.”
I enjoyed the first third of the run quite a bit but by the end it really lost me. Rogue should’ve just gone home and stayed there until one of the plots was actually concluded. It would have been nice to have a concise middle America home grown plot for once. Not everything needs to be end of the world big.
Rogue, Going Rogue is overall an adequate Marvel comic book. It’s a standalone that at least doesn’t need an absolute ton of backstory and tie ins. It helps if you’re familiar with Rogue and Gambit’s relationship as well as some of the X-Men but I wouldn’t say it’s completely mandatory. Many of the cameos come and go without consequence so you’d only be missing out of that blip of “hey I know them!”
If you love Rogue, give this one a shot.
3/5 back home agains 🏡🏡🏡
For even more Rogue and Gambit check out Mr and Mrs X
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Buy it here: Rogue: Going Rogue (Rogue (2004-2005))
So, did the characters remember what happened after the “reset” ending, or were their memories of events wiped out? That’s my most hated comics trope, when it’s not just the story that gets reset, but the characters’ memories are wiped too. The Infinity Gauntlet miniseries did that and DC used to do it with practically every Per Degaton story. If the whole story never really happens, why the hell did I waste all that time and money reading it?
Honestly I don’t know. I either stopped caring or fell asleep by that point. But it all felt pointless, that total reset of what did we even do all of this for then?!